He lifted her into the buggy and walked beside her, his hand on the reins, as the mule crept drowsily along the five miles between the valley and the Calhoun farm. He spoke little. He was in a rapturous dream, in which the warm sunlight, the woods, the soft fingers which he touched now and then, bore a part.
Isabel talked or sang softly to herself, as she always did when she was happy. Once he heard her say, "I should try oats in that meadow, if I were you. And I should not be surprised if corundum could be found in those rocks back of the house."
Oats and corundum?
Tears of vexation stood in her eyes as he looked at her perplexed. "It is the farm I mean. You don't seem to have heard me. My father is so practical! Indeed, indeed, it is only by hard work that you can gain his consent."
"Oh, I understand perfectly," gazing dreamily into her eyes. "I shall go to work upon that place: I shall tear it all up—next spring." He walked on beside her. The golden light deepened in the west; the air was full of delicious resinous odors from the pine forest; now and then he pressed his lips to the warm, rose-tinted hand. Surely, he thought, this divine draught which they had just begun to taste was not as sweet to her as he found it, or she would not care to talk of oats and corundum.
When he left her he sauntered leisurely up the mountain wrapt in a delirious ecstasy. Suddenly he quickened his steps: "I must go and hear Uncle Scroope's will. A chance of something thar. No need of grubbing out my life then in that old sheep-pasture." But he soon slackened his pace again, thinking with a glow of exultation how true and tender he would be to his love—how he could fight for her if need be. He wished there were some foes to fight. No doubt if there had been, Dave would have done his devoir, for he was as gallant a gentleman as any Sidney of them all.
Isabel sat on the porch alone that evening. The women, with the men, were at work ploughing corn on the upland, and her father would not return from Sevier until late. The sun was going down, throwing the shadow of a great peak of the Balsam Range over the house and the neat farm with its Pennsylvania barn and fences. High up on the mountain heaps of mica outside of the gaping black mouth of a deserted mine glistened like silver.
A queer little figure was coming up the lonely road. Isabel saw it, and laughed. Nobody could mistake the consequential strut, the flapping linen suit, the white hat with its band of crape. But Isabel was in a happy, tender mood toward all the world to-night; and she had always been gentle with the poor little major. She only, of all the people in Sevier, saw beneath the drunken braggart a man who had been sorely worsted, and that perhaps not fairly, in the long fight. He was quite sober this evening. But as she rose to meet him she saw signs of an odd change in him. The linen clothes were scrupulously clean, costly ruby buttons blazed in his shirt-front, on his fore finger was a curious antique ring never seen there before: the usual defiant jauntiness of the man had given way to a more significant self-assertion, as if he had at last found secure ground beneath his feet.
"My father is not at home, Major Fetridge: I am sorry," said Isabel, offering him a chair.
But he remained standing, leaning airily against a pillar, looking down at her. "I am not sorry, Miss Calhoun. It was you that I came to see," he said pointedly. A nervous smile showed his teeth; his pale blue eyes shone: the little man was, she saw, aflame with some secret exultation as with wine.